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Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

blog.filippo.io

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Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#371

Post by strenholme »

Jupe wrote: post #152

I don't know... I just don't see how OSS will ever be a real, sustainable business. The moment it does, someone else will simply subvert the paid-for software with a look-alike that does 90% of what the original does, but for free. In my view, this is the birth story of OSS. And I don't see any real market there. Even if you manage to find a "niche", like some sustainable software-as-a-service with subscription, ther…

To be fair here, there’s still a thriving market of for-pay DAWs (digital audio workstations) out there: Reaper, Ableton, Cubase, Studio One, Logic, even Pro Tools. Indeed, most musicians I interact with use proprietary software to make music, and I am a proud customer of all of ValhallaDSP’s reverbs.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#372

Post by another_story »

colinmhayes wrote: post #274
another_story wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd wager companies hire based on leetcode because it's efficient from an administerial perspective. It can be easily automated and helps weed out a greater number of poor candidates than good ones. It's easier for an interviewer to pull out a set of pre-written questions than look through a github repo and ask pointed questions. Too much of what we do, from education (standardized tests) to banning of users in place…

Companies use Leetcode because it tests for the 2 things that are required to become a successful developer, above average critical thinking skills and willingness to spend hundreds of hours improving. Companies figure if you have those two things they can make you into a decent developer, figuring out if someone is already a good developer is much harder.

Or does it test for someone who in the hope of passing these tests will spend hundreds of hours dedicated to pointless exercises that produce no real value?

If by harder, you mean sitting down and having a real conversation, then yes, I suppose it's harder.

Edit: Value is a poor word here, now that I think about it. Let's say mostly pointless activities that generally don't apply to work they'll be doing with that skill. It's like playing baseball to practice for tennis.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#373

Post by moksly »

the_af wrote: post #166
creamytaco wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reviewing code is the elephant in the room. Filosotile -perhaps out of ignorance or disconnect- fails to mention that the vast majority of open source projects (log4j being a great recent example) are absolute shit. Nobody should be building anything on top, nevermind giving the maintainers more money. In-house development, software BOMs, rising of standards and multiple rounds of code review are the processes that t…

> In-house development ... keeps resulting in shit code, too! There's no evidence standards of quality are rising. In my own extremely limited view of in-house software -- i.e. my own professional experience -- code quality is crap, standard quality practices are very low and actually worse than in FOSS projects (I've seen someone mention more than once that "this crap PR simply wouldn't fly if this were an open sour…

I didn’t say in-house code was good, but it does keep you from being exploited by things like what recently happened with NPM.

Companies genuinely don’t care about the software they use, as long as it works and isn’t hacked. This is especially true in non-tech enterprise.

At my former place they still had hundreds of ASP Webforms with custom in-house ASP libraries that were utter shit, but they worked.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#374

Post by moksly »

the_af wrote: post #166
creamytaco wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reviewing code is the elephant in the room. Filosotile -perhaps out of ignorance or disconnect- fails to mention that the vast majority of open source projects (log4j being a great recent example) are absolute shit. Nobody should be building anything on top, nevermind giving the maintainers more money. In-house development, software BOMs, rising of standards and multiple rounds of code review are the processes that t…

> In-house development ... keeps resulting in shit code, too! There's no evidence standards of quality are rising. In my own extremely limited view of in-house software -- i.e. my own professional experience -- code quality is crap, standard quality practices are very low and actually worse than in FOSS projects (I've seen someone mention more than once that "this crap PR simply wouldn't fly if this were an open sour…

I didn’t say in-house code was good, but it does keep you from being exploited by things like what recently happened with NPM.

Companies genuinely don’t care about the software they use, as long as it works and isn’t hacked. This is especially true in non-tech enterprise. At my former place they still had hundreds of ASP Webforms with custom in-house ASP libraries that were utter shit, but they worked.

What I’m postulating is that this is the alternative to the current status que.

I’d personally love for NPM to review their packages, or for a big player like Microsoft to step in and make a more limited platform with reviews, but I just don’t think anyone is going to be willing to pay for it.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#375

Post by dan-robertson »

dilyevsky wrote: post #350
mbrodersen wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should the companies pay more than $0 for code with a price tag of $0? Do you normally pay more than the asking price for things you buy?

Why would anyone pay for business class airline tickets instead of (subsidized) coach? They both get to the destination at the same time!

If you want people to travel (because them travelling is good for business) you probably don’t want them to be stiff and unproductive after a long flight, and you don’t want to make the experience so unpleasant that they won’t want to travel.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#376

Post by KronisLV »

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #369
jbk wrote: post #74

> Now is the perfect time for Open Source maintainers to become legible to the big companies that depend on them—and that want to get more out of them—and send them five-to-six figure invoices. Well, this is exactly what I've been doing around VideoLAN (VLC, x264) and FFmpeg for the last few years. In order to do that, I've created 2 official companies Videolabs and FFlabs (besides the non-profit orgs) and I've gone…

> and I've gone through all the hoops to get paid (PO, billing, invoices, registering to large companies is a lot of paperwork, tbh, but well..) and we try and bill small to large companies that depends on those projects. I see an opportunity to create a "create-a-company"-as-a-service, to help tons of other maintainers to do this with ease.

Why not just have an intermediate company that handles the donation/support aspects? I mean, we already have Open Collective: https://opencollective.com/ and for other content creators the likes of Patreon also work out nicely.

Two examples, off the top of my head:

1) Here's how Open Collective looks, for jMonkeyEngine (a lovely Java game engine that's also a bit underfunded and underutilized): https://opencollective.com/jmonkeyengine

2) Also, here's the Patreon of Godot (a more hyped and better funded engine): https://www.patreon.com/godotengine

Why would large enterprises not just use a tool like that, if they already use the likes of AWS or other IaaS/PaaS/SaaS offerings?

But i definitely agree that a lot of open source is underfunded and as a consequence many can't work on it full time or even every day, because things are dire financially otherwise: https://staltz.com/software-below-the-poverty-line.html

Not everyone has cushy jobs that make them $100k a year, i make closer to $21k in Europe now, about which i wrote on my blog: https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/on-finances-and-savings

It feels to me that perhaps the solution here is to have something like a bot on GitHub/GitLab, that adds a comment to issues: "If you'd like to express to the maintainers how important this issue is and draw more attention to it, then submit a payment here: ... Payments so far: ... (possibly with messages by supporters)"

Most people don't care about Open Collective or GitHub Sponsors or whatever, they just want to make feature requests or bug reports. If their attention is captured and the ability to make their own request/report more visible is offered to them as a part of that process, maybe things would be a bit better? I've definitely heard the sentiment expressed that micropayments have the potential to improve how we interact with others on the web in some ways, i'm just not sure how viable that is.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#377

Post by watwut »

webmaven wrote: post #362
watwut wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Supposed as per economical theory/ideology, legal expectations and also per "what kind of CEO will get the job". It is not like most of the time randomly. It is like that, because economic system is designed to work that way.

> It is like that, because economic system is designed to work that way. "Designed" is probably putting it too strongly. But however you characterize the process that got it that way, people did it, and people can change it with enough effort. In fact it is constantly changing, and each of us can decide the direction we are going to push it, and how hard. "And friends, they may thinks it's a movement." — Arlo Guthrie…

There were economists articles literally claiming this is good and pushing for reforms to that effect. Neoliberslism is literally theory that claims the companies should seek profit and only profit and then everything else will be good.

They got their reforms, so yes it was designed.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#378

Post by watwut »

DarylZero wrote: post #269
watwut wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Supposed as per economical theory/ideology, legal expectations and also per "what kind of CEO will get the job". It is not like most of the time randomly. It is like that, because economic system is designed to work that way.

That's a myth about legal expectations. "every state has enacted a corporate statute giving managers explicit authority to donate corporate funds for charitable purposes" https://digitalcommons.law.villanova.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi...

Being allowed to donate to charity does not make those managers responsible for anything else then profit.

(I am not necessary saying companies should run social support. I don't think so. But they are nor responsible for anything but the profit.)

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#379

Post by tomerv »

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #369
jbk wrote: post #74

> Now is the perfect time for Open Source maintainers to become legible to the big companies that depend on them—and that want to get more out of them—and send them five-to-six figure invoices. Well, this is exactly what I've been doing around VideoLAN (VLC, x264) and FFmpeg for the last few years. In order to do that, I've created 2 official companies Videolabs and FFlabs (besides the non-profit orgs) and I've gone…

> and I've gone through all the hoops to get paid (PO, billing, invoices, registering to large companies is a lot of paperwork, tbh, but well..) and we try and bill small to large companies that depends on those projects. I see an opportunity to create a "create-a-company"-as-a-service, to help tons of other maintainers to do this with ease.

According to GP that's still the easier part. A more valuable service would be a "bill-a-company-for-your-open-source-work"-as-a-service.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#380

Post by mbrodersen »

strenholme wrote: post #361
mbrodersen wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can’t be sure you’re not trolling; I will assume good faith and think you actually believe this ridiculous argument. OK and I will assume you are not trolling and that your explanations of things I already understand was done with good intentions and not being condescending. You clearly don't understand my argument and are offering a straw man interpretation. So in the spirit of explaining things, let me try agai…

Thank you for the reply, but you didn’t address the point I am making. My argument is this: People are unreasonable when they expect free hand-holding support just because the software is free . I never argued in this thread that people should pay for my open source software. What I am saying is that people are being unreasonably entitled when they expect to also have free professional level support (e.g. private ema…

> People are unreasonable when they expect free hand-holding support just because the software is free

I agree. I don't argue that people should expect support to be free. What I am arguing is that if you don't put a market value on your work then you are signaling to the world that your skills and hours are worth $0. Even though your work clearly has intrinsic value for companies/people.

> Trollish, because telling open source developers that their software has no worth comes awfully close to the “no personal attacks” rules ycombinator has.

Not at all. The work open source developers do clearly has intrinsic value. It is useful. That's why people use it. However it has $0 market value when maintainers give it away for $0. And that has real world consequences.

> There are a lot of free market fundamentalists out there that think the free market will magically solve all problems.

I am not one of them.

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